Kepler Confirms 1,284 Exoplanets Outside Solar System

A study published yesterday in the Astrophysical Journal by a group of researchers confirms an additional 1,284 exoplanets have been spotted by Kepler, NASA’s planet-hunting spacecraft. That brings the total number of verified exoplanets from Kepler to more than 2,000 — more than doubling the amount spotted by the spacecraft.

“We have more than doubled the number of known exoplanets smaller than the size of Neptune,” Tim Morton, an associate research scholar at Princeton University.